Chapter Text
The boy and the girl grew up looking for snails. They were young. They were full of freckles, sunburns, and sticky orphan fingers. She loved his freckles. Everyone else’s freckles were like polka dots; his were like galaxies. They seemed to multiply with time.
She loved to look at him.
He loved to look at snails. They came home to the orphanage with buckets full of them, and they were lashed for it. They thought it endlessly silly anyway. They stuffed snails into mattresses and hid them in cracks of walls. They collected them in shoeboxes, and the girl sorted them from most to least favorite. They played tic-tac-toe and other games with snails, and the boy always won. The girl did not mind.
They did not live there anymore. They were older now.
Still, they looked for snails.
They now searched for one particular snail. The multitudes of their childhood were reduced to a toothpick in a haystack, a slug in a forest, a freckle in a galaxy.
The boy held her hand while they walked in the woods, turning over rocks and twigs. They found worms and beetles. Their group found many snails, but never the one they needed. Days turned into weeks. Water and food ran out. Nights grew longer.
The boy and the girl looked for snails. There was little else to look for anymore.